Wednesday, October 08, 2008

I've often wondered how it is that national polls can be so far out of whack. I remember in late September, early October of 2000, Al Gore was leading by points in the low teens over George W. Bush in almost all the national polls. Yet when it came down to it, Bush gave Gore a sound drubbing in the election. Why?

DJ Drummond explains for us just WHY the national polls are so often wrong, and gives us the proper leader in the national Polls, John McCain.

The good stuff is actually in the comments at the end, where he explains to a reader how he came up with his results and why:

the thing you have to remember about ALL polls, is that certain assumptions are made. Some are quite reasonable, counting a certain percentage for men and a certain amount for women, and the same for differen traces, geographic regions, and so on.

But the Obama Love Fest in the media is circular logic. He gets more press, so he must have more support, so the polls are weighted to show far more democrats than are actually out there. I'm not talking about the historic advantage of democrats to republicans 38 or 39 percent of the voters to the GOP's 35 or 36 percent. I mean polls which weigh as much as 45% democrats to 25% republicans. I will agree that turnout is critical, and if the republicans give up and sit at home, the democrats MAY get their 40-45% of the voters in which case the media-driven polls become self-fulfilling prophecies. But if republicans stay charged, then at the worst they can match almost all of the democrats' votes, and it comes down to a group that the polls have been strangely quiet about.

The independents.

Did you wonder why McCain took the tone he did in the first debate, Mister Reasonable and not on the attck, even when it looked like he had an easy line to Obama's weak spots? Obama was speaking like a democrat, McCain aimed for the indies.

Why have the polls not shown his results? Two reasons. First, polls have crunched hard on indies, because about ONE-THIRD of them have still not made up their mind (from internals at Gallup, CBS, and Fox polls), and so they are down-weighted, as little as 10% of the voters in some cases. And two, most of them are still making up their minds, and the debate laid seeds. It's not an overnight thing.

I tell you plainly, McCain is winning right now, when you take the polls, use their internals to back-step the weighting and re-weight with historical norms.

We.Are.Winning.

And here is the money quote, right at the end:

Ever wonder why Obama is nastier than ever? Why did they try such an obvious dirty trick with getting Ifil as the moderator for the VP debate? He's losing and he knows it.

All Obama can do is bluff, but we have to be careful and not buy the hype.

I know a few Republicans and Conservatives out there that just emotionally seesaw back and forth on this with every new poll showing Obama pulling into the lead, or McCain tightening the race. These folks need to calm down. Realize that the national polls ALWAYS give the Dems a leg up, and that the campaign's internal polls do not reflect the public polls, they reflect DJ Drummond's poll data.

Yes, it's close. But we ARE Winning. As long as we don't give up yet, and keep sprinting towards the finish line, we will beat the Dems, and America will send John McCain and Sarah Palin to Washington as President and Vice President.